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Sci Rep
2015 Nov 23;5:16885. doi: 10.1038/srep16885.
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Outbreak of coral-eating Crown-of-Thorns creates continuous cloud of larvae over 320 km of the Great Barrier Reef.
Uthicke S
,
Doyle J
,
Duggan S
,
Yasuda N
,
McKinnon AD
.
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Coral reefs are in decline worldwide due to a combination of local and global causes. Over 40% of the recent coral loss on Australia''s Great Barrier Reef (GBR) has been attributed to outbreaks of the coral-eating Crown-of-Thorns Seastar (CoTS). Testing of the hypotheses explaining these outbreaks is hampered by an inability to investigate the spatio-temporal distribution of larvae because they resemble other planktotrophic echinoderm larvae. We developed a genetic marker and tested it on 48 plankton samples collected during the 2014 spawning season in the northern GBR, and verified the method by PCR amplification of single larva. Surprisingly, most samples collected contained CoTS larvae. Larvae were detected 100 km south of current outbreaks of adult seastars, highlighting the potential for rapid expansion of the outbreak. A minimum estimate suggested that larvae numbers in the outbreak area (>10(10)) are about 4 orders of magnitude higher than adults (~10(6)) in the same area, implying that attempts to halt outbreaks by removing adults may be futile.
Figure 1. Map of the Northern Section of the Great Barrier Reef indicating field sample locations.Red dots represent positive hits for CoTS DNA, yellow dots are negative samples. Inserts show individual reefs where vertical tows were conducted from the tender; from north to south: Osterlund Reef, Ribbon Reef No. 1 and Rudder Reef. Station details are in Supplementary Table 1. The map was prepared using ArcMap 10.2 (Environmental Systems Research Institute, Redlands, California) and Adobe Illustrator CS6 (Adobe Systems Incorporated, San Jose, California).
Figure 2. Neighbor joining tree of COI sequences for Acanthaster planci.Major clades are collapsed; bold print names are GenBank numbers of sequences from previous work. Numbers on nodes represent the percentage of bootstrap replicates (1000) supporting the respective node. Numbers are abbreviated version of the sample code (Supplementary Table 1), ‘L’ indicates sequences from an individual larva from a respective sample (e.g. 7-L1 indicates larva 1, collected from sample COT007).
Figure 3. Photographs of ethanol fixed larvae from laboratory cultures and field collections.A. planci larvae from cultures: (A) early bipinnaria (2d larvae), (B) bipinnaria (6d) and (C) (14d) Brachiolaria Larvae. Larvae genetically identified as Asteroidea, nearest GenBank matches (D) Luidia maculata, (E) Oreaster occidentalis, (F) Patiriella parvivipara; and Holothuroidea: (G) Holothuria impatiens, (H) H. colouber and (I) H. arenicola. Details for GenBank matches are given in Supplementary Table 3.
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